Welcome to the Web Development Forum's sixth "What are you working on?" thread. To keep things running smoothly, please try to stick to the following guidelines:

▬ This isn't a question thread; please avoid using it as such.
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How does it work? does the screen cutting off like that look ok? Or should I show the full screen?

It feels like you've taken a print screen of the website then shown half of it. I'd say you should show the full screen. Maybe try having two column text on top then the screen then the input boxes. Then have the screen to have a slider that changes to show what "Gradstr" does.

It feels like you've taken a print screen of the website then shown half of it. I'd say you should show the full screen. Maybe try having two column text on top then the screen then the input boxes. Then have the screen to have a slider that changes to show what "Gradstr" does.

[LIST][*]Don't be a jerk.[*]Stay on-topic ( but do keep in mind this is accepted as the general chat thread for this section ).[*]Don't post while drunk.[*]Don't post while pretending to be drunk. Really, that's just embarrassing for everyone.[/LIST]

I honestly like the favicon colors better then the purple on the website. I know you're probably past the "playing around with the background" phase of design but seriously, try reducing the opacity of the pattern by about 5-10% and go for something a little less mega purple and more of a dark purple/pink. Just do it. I'm curious!

He takes tutorials and such from nettuts and other sites and then combines them all and calls it his own work.

Pipe down. Many of the actual elements are Orman Clarks. Apart from Orman Clark freebies there is nothing that could in anyway be attributed to anyone else or a tutorial. What percentage of design is 100% new? Very little. Design is all about using, expanding, improving and collating existing pieces/practices and the combination of these is design. A movie can have some great special effects and people don't say "What? they didn't make any special effects! The car scene was basically a copy of the italian job, the explosion was from tropic thunder, the helicopter crash was a mix between Die hard 4 and mission impossible.". The design I just posted is a unique combination of design elements which I think have produced an easy to use and intuitive interface.

Do you honestly think that an artist would be able to make nice music if they had never heard any piece of music? NO - they take and expand upon existing pieces to create there own. That's why you get trends in design - everyone isn't magically coming up with the same ideas at once.

I believe this forum is "web development" not "web design".

Take this example:

I was designing the appearance page (yes actually doing some thinking and designing - even though you find it hard to believe that I am capable of doing that) and had decided that the theme tiles with the additional info displayed on hover was a good way of doing things (inspiration was bbc iplayer). I needed a tick image which shows the selected theme - I knew that Orman Clark has released one that looked really nice. If you're telling me that you would go into photoshop and spend some time creating this all new radical tick to put on your design just so you could say "I made that tick" then fine - you obviously like wasting your time when a perfectly good resource is available for you. If (and I suspect this is the case) not then you have to ask yourself if you are not being slightly hypocritical. Its not as if I said "I designed that tick" or I've copied an entire design as is - I have used elements from loads of places including many of my own for my UI. You won't find that appearance page design anywhere else - it came out of my brain. And if the new wordpress themes page sports a similiar design (which it might well do as I am one of the people that am responsible for redoing the current one) I wouldn't say "oi - I designed that" I would be pleased that it is being adopted in software used on over 50 million sites. After all, if you know of a better way of doing something then why wouldn't you do it that way?

Pipe down. Many of the actual elements are Orman Clarks. Apart from Orman Clark freebies there is nothing that could in anyway be attributed to anyone else or a tutorial. What percentage of design is 100% new? Very little. Design is all about using, expanding, improving and collating existing pieces/practices and the combination of these is design. A movie can have some great special effects and people don't say "What? they didn't make any special effects! The car scene was basically a copy of the italian job, the explosion was from tropic thunder, the helicopter crash was a mix between Die hard 4 and mission impossible.". The design I just posted is a unique combination of design elements which I think have produced an easy to use and intuitive interface.

Do you honestly think that an artist would be able to make nice music if they had never heard any piece of music? NO - they take and expand upon existing pieces to create there own. That's why you get trends in design - everyone isn't magically coming up with the same ideas at once.

yeah I agree, it's very difficult to design something functional (As opposed to purely for aesthetics) without taking inspiration from different sources, because the stuff other good people have used is what works best

Most people use freebies as inspirational tidbits, not as actual design elements. I think that's the point he was making.

The only 2 things in that image that were taken were the tick on the theme (its a tick - come on there is only so many ways to do a tick) and the beta banner background was taken from xcode - again there is only so many ways to do a beta banner why spend time creating something that either doesn't look as good or essentially looks the same when you could just use that one? I can't wait to start doing my donation page - I have a great vision as to what I want that to look like and because it is more aesthetcics than functional it will be all mine.

11th July 2011
Last edited by Vietnow; 11th July 2011 at 06:49PM.
Post #30